The Bench of Desolation, by Henry James

IV

It was seldom he was disturbed in any form of sequestered speculation, or that at his times of
predilection, especially that of the long autumn blankness between the season of trippers and the season of
Bath-chairs, there were westward stragglers enough to jar upon his settled sense of priority. For himself his seat, the
term of his walk, was consecrated; it had figured to him for years as the last (though there were others, not
immediately near it, and differently disposed, that might have aspired to the title); so that he could invidiously
distinguish as he approached, make out from a distance any accident of occupation, and never draw nearer while that
unpleasantness lasted. What he disliked was to compromise on his tradition, whether for a man, a woman or a connoodling
couple; it was to idiots of this last composition he most objected, he having sat there, in the past, alone, having sat
there interminably with Nan, having sat there with — well, with other women when women, at hours of ease, could still
care or count for him, but having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger. It was a world of
fidgets and starts, however, the world of his present dreariness — he alone possessed in it, he seemed to make out, of
the secret, of the dignity of sitting still with one’s fate; so that if he took a turn about or rested briefly
elsewhere even foolish philanderers — though this would never have been his and Nan’s way — ended soon by some
adjournment as visibly pointless as their sprawl. Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of
desolation — which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption; where, for that matter, moreover, once he had
settled at his end, it was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the Marina, take this liberty
with other resting presences; but his own struck them perhaps in general as either of too grim or just of too dingy a
vicinage. He might have affected the fellow-lounger as a man evil, unsociable, possibly engaged in working out the idea
of a crime; or otherwise, more probably — for on the whole he surely looked harmless — devoted to the worship of some
absolutely unpractical remorse.

On a certain October Saturday he had got off, as usual, early; but the afternoon light, his pilgrimage drawing to
its aim, could still show him, at long range, the rare case of an established usurper. His impulse was then, as by
custom, to deviate a little and wait, all the more that the occupant of the bench was a lady, and that ladies, when
alone, were — at that austere end of the varied frontal stretch — markedly discontinuous; but he kept on at sight of
this person’s rising, while he was still fifty yards off, and proceeding, her back turned, to the edge of the broad
terrace, the outer line of which followed the interspaced succession of seats and was guarded by an iron rail from the
abruptly lower level of the beach. Here she stood before the sea, while our friend on his side, recognising no reason
to the contrary, sank into the place she had quitted. There were other benches, eastward and off by the course of the
drive, for vague ladies. The lady indeed thus thrust upon Herbert’s vision might have struck an observer either as not
quite vague or as vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design.

Not that our own observer at once thought of these things; he only took in, and with no great interest, that the
obtruded presence was a “real” lady; that she was dressed — he noticed such matters — with a certain elegance of
propriety or intention of harmony; and that she remained perfectly still for a good many minutes; so many in fact that
he presently ceased to heed her, and that as she wasn’t straight before him, but as far to the left as was consistent
with his missing her profile, he had turned himself to one of his sunsets again (though it wasn’t quite one of his
best) and let it hold him for a time that enabled her to alter her attitude and present a fuller view. Without other
movement, but her back now to the sea and her face to the odd person who had appropriated her corner, she had taken a
sustained look at him before he was aware she had stirred. On that apprehension, however, he became also promptly aware
of her direct, her applied observation. As his sense of this quickly increased he wondered who she was and what she
wanted — what, as it were, was the matter with her; it suggested to him, the next thing, that she had, under some
strange idea, actually been waiting for him. Any idea about him to-day on the part of any one could only be
strange.

Yes, she stood there with the ample width of the Marina between them, but turned to him, for all the world, as to
show frankly that she was concerned with him. And she was — oh yes — a real lady: a middle-aged person, of
good appearance and of the best condition, in quiet but “handsome” black, save for very fresh white kid gloves, and
with a pretty, dotty, becoming veil, predominantly white, adjusted to her countenance; which through it somehow, even
to his imperfect sight, showed strong fine black brows and what he would have called on the spot character. But she was
pale; her black brows were the blacker behind the flattering tissue; she still kept a hand, for support, on the
terrace-rail, while the other, at the end of an extended arm that had an effect of rigidity, clearly pressed hard on
the knob of a small and shining umbrella, the lower extremity of whose stick was equally, was sustainingly, firm on the
walk. So this mature, qualified, important person stood and looked at the limp, undistinguished — oh his values of
aspect now! — shabby man on the bench.

It was extraordinary, but the fact of her interest, by immensely surprising, by immediately agitating him, blinded
him at first to her identity and, for the space of his long stare, diverted him from it; with which even then, when
recognition did break, the sense of the shock, striking inward, simply consumed itself in gaping stillness. He sat
there motionless and weak, fairly faint with surprise, and there was no instant, in all the succession of so many, at
which Kate Cookham could have caught the special sign of his intelligence. Yet that she did catch something he saw —
for he saw her steady herself, by her two supported hands, to meet it; while, after she had done so, a very wonderful
thing happened, of which he could scarce, later on, have made a clear statement, though he was to think it over again
and again. She moved toward him, she reached him, she stood there, she sat down near him, he merely passive and
wonderstruck, unresentfully “impressed,” gaping and taking it in — and all as with an open allowance on the part of
each, so that they positively and quite intimately met in it, o the impertinence for their case, this case that brought
them again, after horrible years, face to face, of the vanity, the profanity, the impossibility, of anything between
them but silence.

Nearer to him, beside him at a considerable interval (oh she was immensely considerate!) she presented him, in the
sharp terms of her transformed state — but thus the more amply, formally, ceremoniously — with the reasons that would
serve him best for not having precipitately known her. She was simply another and a totally different person, and the
exhibition of it to which she had proceeded with this solemn anxiety was all, obviously, for his benefit — once he had,
as he appeared to be doing, provisionally accepted her approach. He had remembered her as inclined to the massive and
disowned by the graceful; but this was a spare, fine, worn, almost wasted lady — who had repaired waste, it was true,
however, with something he could only appreciate as a rich accumulation of manner. She was strangely older, so far as
that went — marked by experience and as if many things had happened to her; her face had suffered, to its improvement,
contraction and concentration; and if he had granted, of old and from the first, that her eyes were remarkable, had
they yet ever had for him this sombre glow? Withal, something said, she had flourished — he felt it, wincing at it, as
that; she had had a life, a career, a history — something that her present waiting air and nervous consciousness
couldn’t prevent his noting there as a deeply latent assurance. She had flourished, she had flourished — though to
learn it after this fashion was somehow at the same time not to feel she flaunted it. It wasn’t thus execration that
she revived in him; she made in fact, exhibitively, as he could only have put it, the matter of long ago irrelevant,
and these extraordinary minutes of their reconstituted relation — how many? how few? — addressed themselves altogether
to new possibilities.

Still it after a little awoke in him as with the throb of a touched nerve that his own very attitude was supplying a
connection; he knew presently that he wouldn’t have had her go, couldn’t have made a sign to her for it —
which was what she had been uncertain of — without speaking to him; and that therefore he was, as at the other, the
hideous time, passive to whatever she might do. She was even yet, she was always, in possession of him; she had known
how and where to find him and had appointed that he should see her, and, though he had never dreamed it was again to
happen to him, he was meeting it already as if it might have been the only thing that the least humanly could.
Yes, he had come back there to flop, by long custom, upon the bench of desolation as the man in the whole
place, precisely, to whom nothing worth more than tuppence could happen; whereupon, in the grey desert of his
consciousness, the very earth had suddenly opened and flamed. With this, further, it came over him that he hadn’t been
prepared and that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn’t fit to receive a visit — any visit; a flush for his
felt misery, in the light of her opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he was — she
should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at
the sea. That, however, didn’t relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another moment the odd desperate
gesture of raising both his hands to his face and letting them, while he pressed it to them, cover and guard it. It was
as he held them there that she at last spoke.

“I’ll go away if you wish me to.” And then she waited a moment. “I mean now — now that you’ve seen I’m here. I
wanted you to know it, and I thought of writing — I was afraid of our meeting accidentally. Then I was afraid that if I
wrote you might refuse. So I thought of this way — as I knew you must come out here.” She went on with pauses, giving
him a chance to make a sign. “I’ve waited several days. But I’ll do what you wish. Only I should like in that case to
come back.” Again she stopped; but strange was it to him that he wouldn’t have made her break off. She held him in
boundless wonder. “I came down — I mean I came from town — on purpose. I’m staying on still, and I’ve a great patience
and will give you time. Only may I say it’s important? Now that I do see you,” she brought out in the same way, “I see
how inevitable it was — I mean that I should have wanted to come. But you must feel about it as you can,” she wound up
— “till you get used to the idea.”

She spoke so for accommodation, for discretion, for some ulterior view already expressed in her manner, that, after
taking well in, from behind his hands, that this was her very voice — oh ladylike! — heard, and heard in deprecation of
displeasure, after long years again, he uncovered his face and freshly met her eyes. More than ever he couldn’t have
known her. Less and less remained of the figure all the facts of which had long ago so hardened for him. She was a
handsome, grave, authoritative, but refined and, as it were, physically rearranged person — she, the outrageous
vulgarity of whose prime assault had kept him shuddering so long as a shudder was in him. That atrocity in her was what
everything had been built on, but somehow, all strangely, it was slipping from him; so that, after the oddest fashion
conceivable, when he felt he mustn’t let her go, it was as if he were putting out his hand to save the past, the
hideous real unalterable past, exactly as she had been the cause of its being and the cause of his undergoing it. He
should have been too awfully “sold” if he wasn’t going to have been right about her.

“I don’t mind,” he heard himself at last say. Not to mind had seemed for the instant the length he was prepared to
go; but he was afterward aware of how soon he must have added: “You’ve come on purpose to see me?” He was on the point
of putting to her further: “What then do you want of me?” But he would keep — yes, in time — from appearing to show he
cared. If he showed he cared, where then would be his revenge? So he was already, within five minutes, thinking his
revenge uncomfortably over instead of just comfortably knowing it. What came to him, at any rate, as they actually fell
to talk, was that, with such precautions, considerations, reduplications of consciousness, almost avowed feelings of
her way on her own part, and light fingerings of his chords of sensibility, she was understanding, she had
understood, more things than all the years, up to this strange eventide, had given him an inkling of. They talked, they
went on — he hadn’t let her retreat, to whatever it committed him and however abjectly it did so; yet keeping off and
off, dealing with such surface facts as involved ancient acquaintance but held abominations at bay. The recognition,
the attestation that she had come down for him, that there would be reasons, that she had even hovered and
watched, assured herself a little of his habits (which she managed to speak of as if, on their present ampler
development, they were much to be deferred to), detained them enough to make vivid how, listen as stiffly or as
serenely as he might, she sat there in fear, just as she had so stood there at first, and that her fear had really to
do with her calculation of some sort of chance with him. What chance could it possibly be? Whatever it might have done,
on this prodigious showing, with Kate Cookham, it made the present witness to the state of his fortunes simply
exquisite: he ground his teeth secretly together as he saw he should have to take that. For what did it mean
but that she would have liked to pity him if she could have done it with safety? Ah, however, he must give her no
measure of safety!

By the time he had remarked, with that idea, that she probably saw few changes about them there that weren’t for the
worse — the place was going down, down and down, so fast that goodness knew where it would stop — and had also
mentioned that in spite of this he himself remained faithful, with all its faults loving it still; by the time he had,
after that fashion, superficially indulged her, adding a few further light and just sufficiently dry reflections on
local matters, the disappearance of landmarks and important persons, the frequency of gales, the low policy of the
town-council in playing down to cheap excursionists: by the time he had so acquitted himself, and she had observed, of
her own motion, that she was staying at the Royal, which he knew for the time-honoured, the conservative and exclusive
hotel, he had made out for himself one thing at least, the amazing fact that he had been landed by his troubles, at the
end of time, in a “social relation,” of all things in the world, and how of that luxury he was now having unprecedented
experience. He had but once in his life had his nose in the Royal, on the occasion of his himself delivering a parcel
during some hiatus in his succession of impossible small boys and meeting in the hall the lady who had bought of him,
in the morning, a set of Crabbe, largely, he flattered himself, under the artful persuasion of his acute remarks on
that author, gracefully associated by him, in this colloquy, he remembered, with a glance at Charles Lamb as well, and
who went off in a day or two without settling, though he received her cheque from London three or four months
later.

That hadn’t been a social relation; and truly, deep within his appeal to himself to be remarkable, to be
imperturbable and impenetrable, to be in fact quite incomparable now, throbbed the intense vision of his drawing out
and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He would do it, moreover — that would be the refinement of his
art — not only without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by seeing her flounder (since she
must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering by the
time he had brought her — it had taken ten minutes — down to a consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the
reported precarious state, for instance, of the syndicate running the Bijou Theatre at the Pierhead — all as an
admonition that she might want him to want to know why she was thus waiting on him, might want it for all she was
worth, before he had ceased to be so remarkable as not to ask her. He didn’t — and this assuredly was wondrous enough —
want to do anything worse to her than let her flounder; but he was willing to do that so long as it mightn’t prevent
his seeing at least where he was. He seemed still to see where he was even at the minute that followed her
final break-off, clearly intended to be resolute, from make-believe talk.

“I wonder if I might prevail on you to come to tea with me to-morrow at five.”

He didn’t so much as answer it — though he could scarcely believe his ears. To-morrow was Sunday, and the proposal
referred, clearly, to the custom of “five-o’clock” tea, known to him only by the contemporary novel of manners and the
catchy advertisement of table-linen. He had never in his life been present at any such luxurious rite, but he was
offering practical indifference to it as a false mark of his sense that his social relation had already risen to his
chin. “I gave up my very modest, but rather interesting little old book business, perhaps you know, ever so long
ago.”

She floundered so that she could say nothing — meet that with no possible word; all the less too that his
tone, casual and colourless, wholly defied any apprehension of it as a reverse. Silence only came; but after a moment
she returned to her effort. “If you can come I shall be at home. To see you otherwise than thus was in fact
what, as I tell you, I came down for. But I leave it,” she returned, “to your feeling.”

He had at this, it struck him, an inspiration; which he required however a minute or two to decide to carry out; a
minute or two during which the shake of his foot over his knee became an intensity of fidget. “Of course I know I still
owe you a large sum of money. If it’s about that you wish to see me,” he went on, “I may as well tell you just
here that I shall be able to meet my full obligation in the future as little as I’ve met it in the past. I can never,”
said Herbert Dodd, “pay up that balance.”

He had looked at her while he spoke, but on finishing looked off at the sea again and continued to agitate his foot.
He knew now what he had done and why; and the sense of her fixed dark eyes on him during his speech and after didn’t
alter his small contentment. Yet even when she still said nothing he didn’t turn round; he simply kept his corner as if
that were his point made, should it even be the last word between them. It might have been, for that matter,
from the way in which she presently rose, gathering herself, her fine umbrella and her very small smart reticule, in
the construction of which shining gilt much figured, well together, and, after standing another instant, moved across
to the rail of the terrace as she had done before and remained, as before, with her back to him, though this time, it
well might be, under a different fear. A quarter of an hour ago she hadn’t tried him, and had had that anxiety; now
that she had tried him it wasn’t easier — but she was thinking what she still could do. He left her to think — nothing
in fact more interesting than the way she might decide had ever happened to him; but it was a part of this also that as
she turned round and came nearer again he didn’t rise, he gave her no help. If she got any, at least, from his looking
up at her only, meeting her fixed eyes once more in silence, that was her own affair. “You must think,” she said — “you
must take all your time, but I shall be at home.” She left it to him thus — she insisted, with her idea, on leaving him
something too. And on her side as well she showed an art — which resulted, after another instant, in his having to rise
to his feet. He flushed afresh as he did it — it exposed him so shabbily the more; and now if she took him in, with
each of his seedy items, from head to foot, he didn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t know it, attaching his eyes hard and
straight to something quite away from them.

It stuck in his throat to say he’d come, but she had so curious a way with her that he still less could say he
wouldn’t, and in a moment had taken refuge in something that was neither. “Are you married?” — he put it to her with
that plainness, though it had seemed before he said it to do more for him than while she waited before replying.

“No, I’m not married,” she said; and then had another wait that might have amounted to a question of what this had
to do with it.

He surely couldn’t have told her; so that he had recourse, a little poorly as he felt, but to an “Oh!” that still
left them opposed. He turned away for it — that is for the poorness, which, lingering in the air, had almost a vulgar
platitude; and when he presently again wheeled about she had fallen off as for quitting him, only with a pause, once
more, for a last look. It was all a bit awkward, but he had another happy thought, which consisted in his silently
raising his hat as for a sign of dignified dismissal. He had cultivated of old, for the occasions of life, the right,
the discriminated bow, and now, out of the grey limbo of the time when he could care for such things, this flicker of
propriety leaped and worked She might, for that matter, herself have liked it; since, receding further, only with her
white face toward him, she paid it the homage of submission. He remained dignified, and she almost humbly went.